Leading the Digital Transformation of Water Management
Quick Facts
Company
Birdz
Customer Profile
Birdz, a subsidiary of Nova Veolia, is a leading European smart water management company with nearly two decades of experience. They deliver advanced remote metering, leak detection and data analytics solutions powered by IoT technologies like Semtech’s LoRa devices. Birdz partners with utilities across France and Europe to improve water network efficiency, reduce losses and drive sustainable resource management through digital transformation. Their expertise enables better operational performance and enhanced service quality for customers. Birdz is recognized for pioneering innovative technologies that help utilities tackle complex challenges in water distribution and management.
Objectives
- Replace labor-intensive manual water meter reading.
- Reduce water utility consumption and waste.
- Provide actionable insights to utility operators, municipalities and end-users.
Results
- Increases operational efficiency by wirelessly measuring usage data.
- Instantly detects failure points and leaks in piping networks.
- Monitors total water footprint at a granular level.
Products & Services
Introduction
The Rapid Growth of Smart Utility Metering
Globally, the proportion of smart meters will soon exceed half of all meters shipped annually and represent a market value over $2 billion.
Implementing a smart metering infrastructure allows utility companies the ability to remotely collect data and streamline operations. Solutions leveraging noncellular low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) technologies, such as Semtech’s LoRa® devices and the LoRaWAN® open protocol, are expected to represent up to 20 percent of all smart meters deployed by 2026, according to ABI Research. Smart metering is one of LoRa devices’ most successful market applications due to its unique long range, low power capabilities that offer several advantages for batterypowered meters.
France’s Leader for Smart Water Management
Birdz is a branch of Nova Veolia and has a key role in pioneering smart solutions, such as the remote metering of energy consumption and waste management applications for smart cities, which is a new key market for Veolia’s business entities.
With 19 years of experience in smart water management, Birdz provides water utility operators with a wide range of services, including traditional remote index reading, billing support, leak detection, potential fraud monitoring, subscriber consumption modeling, and forecasting.
Birdz boasts a heritage evolving from a proprietary radio network operator to being one of first companies to partner with Semtech and leverage LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN protocol in the deployment of smart meter projects across Europe.
A smart meter can simply index volumes of water for easy billing. It can also quickly detect all kinds of problems within a water supply network.
Challenge
The Métropole de Lyon is responsible for the drinking water supply and sanitation services of its more than 2.2 million inhabitants within the city and surrounding area. Eau du Grand Lyon serves as the public water service provider defining strategy, determining the price of water and managing the day-to-day delivery of safe drinking water.
In 2015, Eau du Grand Lyon implemented a smart water network consisting of 400,000 smart water G2 sensors and gateways with integrated LoRa devices. The remote water management solution from Birdz included module meters for residential and business facilities, water quality probes and noise correlator sensors on the city’s piping infrastructure. The noise sensors are equivalent to a stethoscope, measuring the sound of water flowing inside pipes to easily detect and accurately pinpoint leaks.
Semtech’s LoRa devices is perfectly suited for smart water metering solutions due to its long range performance, low power consumption and low cost of implementing and operating a complete end-to-end LoRa-based metering application.
Solution
The LoRa-enabled water sensors access the LoRaWAN network to communicate, transmit data and provide alerts. Birdz’s grid management platform correlates the incoming data and displays daily calculations of several key performance indicators on a customized dashboard, including volume of water supplied, volume of water consumed, apparent losses, grid output, linear loss index (LLI), and nighttime flow.
With three million LoRa-based metering devices currently operational, Birdz announced plans to expand its metering deployments by adding an additional three million LoRa-based smart water meters throughout France. The key goal of Veolia Water, one of the world’s largest water utility companies, is the remote reading of more than 70 percent of its installed water meters within the next decade.
Benefits
In just four years, Birdz’s water management approach generated significant benefits. Eau du Grand Lyon utilized comprehensive data from the network to identify and repair more than 1,200 water leaks within its distribution grid. Additionally, the LoRa-based infrastructure saves the city up to one million cubic meters of water annually and yielded an overall eight percent increase in water network efficiency from 77 percent in 2014 to 85.2 percent in 2018.
Birdz plans to roll out similar systems to utility providers in the city of Toulouse, a number of Paris suburbs and other communities across Europe to increase efficiency and productivity while driving down costs.
FROM SENSOR TO SERVICE: DIGITAL SERVICES FOR WATER
